Is fresh always best? Not according to a recent study, which found that canned foods can offer as many nutrients, but more cheaply and conveniently. Here are some especially nutritious canned goods that won't strain your wallet.

Pinto Beans

Nutrition experts are constantly urging Americans to eat healthier — that usually means including more fresh fruits and vegetables in our diet. But fresh foods are expensive and often difficult to obtain for many families, which is why researchers from Ketchum Global Health and Wellness asked the question, Is fresh food really always best?

“There is increasing conversation around ‘fresh’ foods, especially fruits and vegetables, as being more nutritious. Yet, this supposition had not been supported by evidence,” says study author Cathy Kapica, who is also an adjunct professor of nutrition at Tufts University.

Given that canned foods are cheaper than fresh and usually quicker to prepare, Kapica and her team wanted to know whether they could be an equally nutritious but more affordable alternative. The researchers conducted a market-basket study comparing the total cost of getting nutrients from canned, fresh, frozen and dried varieties of common foods.

The conclusion: when price, waste and preparation time were factored in, canned foods won out as the most convenient and affordable source of nutrients. For instance, canned pinto beans cost $1 less per serving as a source of protein and fiber than dried beans. That’s because it takes about six minutes to prepare a can of pinto beans, compared to 2½ hours for dried beans, after soaking and cooking. (The researchers calculated meal prep and cooking time at $7.25 an hour, the minimum wage in New Jersey where the research was conducted.)

“While all forms of the foods — canned, frozen, fresh and dried — were nutritious, when you added the cost of the inedible portions and the cost of the time to prepare to the price, in most cases the canned versions delivered nutrients at a lower total cost,” says Kapica.

@b-sb Please take a course in reading comprehension, because yours is sorely lacking. That wasn't the point of the article. The point of the article was that all other factors considered (waste, prep time, energy costs, etc) canned foods represent a much greater value for the money. If you want to make a tuna sandwich or tuna salad, are you going to use fresh tuna or canned? You would have to cook the fresh, raw tuna first, and then shred it to match what comes in a can. You have to pay for the energy to use the stove to cook it and expend time to get it to the same stage as the canned. It might look better and even taste better to do it yourself, but it will cost a lot more even if you only value your time at minimum wage (and many people value their time a lot higher than that). Any nutritional losses from the processing of canned tuna would be more than offset by the lower cost per pound.